One wonders what the browser market would look like if Microsoft had enabled automatic updates before. Though the overall positions in the market were little changed in May, one thing is clear: Internet Explorer 10's uptake is fast, in a way that no older version of the browser has ever been.

Internet Explorer was up slightly, picking up 0.18 points for a 55.99 percent share of the desktop market. Firefox had stronger growth, up 0.33 points to 20.63 percent. Chrome was the month's big loser, dropping 0.61 points to 15.74 percent—its lowest share since August 2011. Safari was marginally up, adding 0.08 points to reach an all-time high of 5.46 percent. Opera ended the month up 0.04 percent points, at 1.77 percent.

As such, there are no major changes in the overall positions and shares. The big change comes within each browser. Microsoft has traditionally seen fairly slow uptake of new browser versions. Unlike Firefox and Chrome, Internet Explorer didn't upgrade automatically, instead being distributed via Windows Update with a license click-through generally needed before it installed.

Internet Explorer 10 is different, distributed as an automatic, silent update for Windows 7 users. It looks like this is having quite an effect on its uptake. 9.29 percent of Web users are now using Internet Explorer 10, up from 6.04 percent last month. This means that it has overtaken crusty old Internet Explorer 6 with its 6.4 percent share and is well up on Internet Explorer 7, at just 1.79 percent.

IE 10 is still some way behind versions 8 and 9, at 23.09 percent and 15.39 percent, respectively. There wasn't much overall growth in Internet Explorer's market share. That's because 10 grew largely at the expense of 9, which lost 2.78 points last month—which is what one would expect if the growth is coming from updaters.

Compared to Firefox and Chrome, it's clear that Microsoft's cut-overs to new versions are nowhere near as clean and efficient as the competition, which can both boast that the lion's share of their users are on a recent version. Nonetheless, this is still a big improvement on past versions of Internet Explorer. Version 9—which was, at its launch, a good browser—never managed to add as much as 3 points in a single month. Version 10 has now done so two months running. If Microsoft had used automatic updates on older versions of its browser, it's easy to imagine that versions 6 and 7 would by now be distant memories. Alas, no such luck.

This growth is coming almost all on the back of Windows 7, not Windows 8. Windows 8 now stands at a 4.27 percent share of the market—growing, but only slowly. Windows 7 is still the leader at 44.85 percent, with Windows XP second at 37.74 percent—in spite of that operating system having less than a year to go before its support ends.

Over in the mobile space, it's the same old story as always. Safari and Opera Mini were up a bit each, gaining 0.56 points and 0.63 points, respectively. Android Browser was down, falling 2.16 points, though this was offset slightly by Chrome, which gained 0.59 points. Mobile Internet Explorer is also back on the up, adding 0.33 points for a 1.97 percent share.

126 Reader Comments

People expect these kind of usage stats to be based on traffic because that's the only really meaningful metric for most people, which makes NA data kinda useless. If there were 5 gazillion unique IE users but they only looked a 1 page every 10 years.... well, you get it.....

On the other hand if for every 999 IE users visiting a page once, there is some crazy lynx user reloading the same page a million times, then the IE users are probably more important. Just as, if you're writing a commercial website, it's probably more useful to know what your biggest spending customers use rather than mere traffic alone.

All statistics are worthless unless you view them in a sensible context. And what is most relevant is always highly context dependent.

Getting stroppy because you don't like the results is utterly futile. Why on Earth should it matter to you that much?

People expect these kind of usage stats to be based on traffic because that's the only really meaningful metric for most people, which makes NA data kinda useless. If there were 5 gazillion unique IE users but they only looked a 1 page every 10 years.... well, you get it.....

On the other hand if for every 999 IE users visiting a page once, there is some crazy lynx user reloading the same page a million times, then the IE users are probably more important. Just as, if you're writing a commercial website, it's probably more useful to know what your biggest spending customers use rather than mere traffic alone.

All statistics are worthless unless you view them in a sensible context. And what is most relevant is always highly context dependent.

Getting stroppy because you don't like the results is utterly futile. Why on Earth should it matter to you that much?

It matters a great deal to web developers because the goals of doing cool sites and broadly compatible sites are often at odds. IE 8 and 9 may be gone in the US by the end of the user, and when that happens we'll be able to do some cool stuff.

The interesting thing for me on those charts is the slow but steady decline happening with Chrome. I wonder what that is about?

It's probably just the way NetMarket's stats are weighted: their numbers are heavily biased towards the large, traditional US companies who deploy their JavaScript bug on their sites. Compare with something like Akamai's CDN stats and you'll see a fairly different picture, particularly internationally: http://www.akamai.com/html/io/io_dataset.html

The real lesson is that web stats are very hard to compare accurately since data visibility and methodology are so important. If your target audience trends heavily towards US corporate users, NetMarket is probably great; if you are less corporate or North America-centric you'll want to find better sources.

I think a few people in here need to wipe the frothing spittle from around their mouths and calm down a bit. In my case, a lot of the downvotes I tossed out there were not because I disagree with the poster's point, but rather because he/she was acting like a complete jackass. Someone else mentioned that civility and tone matter a lot when it comes to trying to convince people of a differing point of view. I went back and searched for that post, but am sad to say I couldn't find it.

On the other hand if for every 999 IE users visiting a page once, there is some crazy lynx user reloading the same page a million times, then the IE users are probably more important. Just as, if you're writing a commercial website, it's probably more useful to know what your biggest spending customers use rather than mere traffic alone.

All statistics are worthless unless you view them in a sensible context. And what is most relevant is always highly context dependent.

HungryBadger pretty much nailed it. Both statistics are valid, but paint different pictures. That's why the "softer" sciences that have to rely so heavily on analysis to be taken seriously perform multiple tests, looking at the data many different ways.

If you view a sculpture from only one place in the room, can you truly say that you have an understanding of its form?

Knowing what browser each unique visitor is using gives you a good idea of browser penetration. It does not, however, tell you how much use that browser actually gets. Conversely, if you focus solely on usage, you can lose sight of the needs of your lighter users in favor of your heavier ones.

Both metrics give valuable data, each tailored to different needs. The most complete picture of browser share requires analyses of both.

Because this comes up *every month*. And every month it's the same baseless accusations of institutional bias, paid-for-reporting, and astroturfing, mostly I assume because the Net Market Share numbers don't confirm their own personal biases

More accurately, there is plenty of recurring fanboy-ism but the main reason it comes up every month because the story presents a bunch of charts as widely representative without mentioning that all of the data is from a single vendor, that vendor's coverage is pretty limited (only paid sites, mostly American), and varies substantially from other reports. The easiest way to avoid this would be for the story to be more like an actual research report by listing the data source and methodology.

The real lesson is that web stats are very hard to compare accurately since data visibility and methodology are so important. If your target audience trends heavily towards US corporate users, NetMarket is probably great; if you are less corporate or North America-centric you'll want to find better sources.

Which seems counter-sensical to Net Market Share's efforts to normalize their data so it *isn't* weighted towards corporate-centric North America. Otherwise we wouldn't be seeing such a high proportion of IE6 users, which as shown, come predominantly from China and East Asia (IE6 use in the US is a fraction of a percent).

The real lesson is that web stats are very hard to compare accurately since data visibility and methodology are so important. If your target audience trends heavily towards US corporate users, NetMarket is probably great; if you are less corporate or North America-centric you'll want to find better sources.

Which seems counter-sensical to Net Market Share's efforts to normalize their data so it *isn't* weighted towards corporate-centric North America.

That's the problem: they don't appear to have much presence in other parts of the world (last time I did a trace using wheresitup.com it really looked like they're only in Los Angeles) so they have to assume that the people who visit their actual customers are representative of their countries and try to weight the raw values to move it closer to what you think is likely to be true, which is a well-intentioned but intrinsically difficult task. It's much easier if you have more, wider raw data which is why I prefer the Akamai IO dataset, which matches what I see in Google Analytics on an international site much more closely.

http://www.netapplications.com/company.aspx is returning an ASP error (with debug turned on, for shame!) but http://www.hitslink.com/ has a rotating client list which is heavily skewed towards large US media companies. There are a few other ones listed – e.g. Mozilla or Opera – but a quick check doesn't even show the javascript bug being used on their homepages so I'm assuming those are for less popular properties than e.g. mozilla.org.

People expect these kind of usage stats to be based on traffic because that's the only really meaningful metric for most people, which makes NA data kinda useless. If there were 5 gazillion unique IE users but they only looked a 1 page every 10 years.... well, you get it.....

On the other hand if for every 999 IE users visiting a page once, there is some crazy lynx user reloading the same page a million times, then the IE users are probably more important. Just as, if you're writing a commercial website, it's probably more useful to know what your biggest spending customers use rather than mere traffic alone.

All statistics are worthless unless you view them in a sensible context. And what is most relevant is always highly context dependent.

Getting stroppy because you don't like the results is utterly futile. Why on Earth should it matter to you that much?

It matters a great deal to web developers because the goals of doing cool sites and broadly compatible sites are often at odds. IE 8 and 9 may be gone in the US by the end of the user, and when that happens we'll be able to do some cool stuff.

(I'm assuming that you meant IE 8/9 will be gone by the end of the year.) I don't want to sound snarky, and I don't want to presume to know what cool stuff you want to do—I sincerely, honestly don't—but ...

If it was me, I reckon I'd do cool stuff now and let the Luddites upgrade or switch to something that works. (Or, simply have reduced functionality in older versions with a notice that they're running reduced functionality. Here's a nickel kid. Go buy yourself a real browser.)

On the other hand, I'm not a web developer, and I'm certainly not you. If that doesn't work, then I'm sorry, and I, too, hope that people actually upgrade someday.

It matters a great deal to web developers because the goals of doing cool sites and broadly compatible sites are often at odds. IE 8 and 9 may be gone in the US by the end of the user, and when that happens we'll be able to do some cool stuff.

But then it probably doesn't really matter in general still, it matters what visitors to *your* site are using. Chrome or IE could be the most popular web browser in the world but if everyone visiting your site is doing so in Safari, then that's what should count to you. Obviously if you're starting something completely new then it's trickier and you probably then need *both* sets of figures to get a good grasp of what might be important in general, since you can't possibly know what kind of demographic you're going to get in that case.

. It's much easier if you have more, wider raw data which is why I prefer the Akamai IO dataset, which matches what I see in Google Analytics on an international site much more closely.

I can't see how Akamai can be considered a wider dataset when their data is also predominantly biased towards heavily trafficked Western corporate websites and media providers. For example, Akamai provides services for both Facebook and YouTube (the #1 and #3 most heavily trafficked domains on the internet), which are both blocked in China.

The key here (for the purposes of Net Market Share and this article) is to get a representative sample of users, not firehose of data representing traffic. As long as Net Market Share can get an adequate and representative sample from places like China, weighting that sample by population and usage surveys is a perfectly reasonable way to get at the big picture of worldwide browser marketshare.

In spite of Google's activation numbers which claim that every person on the planet owns what, 3?, 4? Android phones by now...In spite of many proclamations in these threads for more than a year that Safari market share is just about to tank...

I can't see how Akamai can be considered a wider dataset when their data is also predominantly biased towards heavily trafficked Western corporate websites and media providers. For example, Akamai provides services for both Facebook and YouTube (the #1 and #3 most heavily trafficked domains on the internet), which are both blocked in China.

There's definitely a common bias towards major corporate sites (which we'll see unless something free like Google Analytics releases stats) but they have plenty of other customers who are not blocked and they presumably have built out many points of presence in China due to customer demand. The public data at http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/dataviz3.html shows that while North America has the highest traffic, there are comparable volumes from Europe, Asia and South America.

. It's much easier if you have more, wider raw data which is why I prefer the Akamai IO dataset, which matches what I see in Google Analytics on an international site much more closely.

I can't see how Akamai can be considered a wider dataset when their data is also predominantly biased towards heavily trafficked Western corporate websites and media providers. For example, Akamai provides services for both Facebook and YouTube (the #1 and #3 most heavily trafficked domains on the internet), which are both blocked in China.

The key here (for the purposes of Net Market Share and this article) is to get a representative sample of users, not firehose of data representing traffic. As long as Net Market Share can get an adequate and representative sample from places like China, weighting that sample by population and usage surveys is a perfectly reasonable way to get at the big picture of worldwide browser marketshare.

This is truly stupid. Facebook & YouTube etc have the most visitors (unique and repeat), therefore they are the most representative of users on the internet. It doesn't make sense to normalize away from them for Chinese, Burmese, and Mongolese internet users.

. It's much easier if you have more, wider raw data which is why I prefer the Akamai IO dataset, which matches what I see in Google Analytics on an international site much more closely.

I can't see how Akamai can be considered a wider dataset when their data is also predominantly biased towards heavily trafficked Western corporate websites and media providers. For example, Akamai provides services for both Facebook and YouTube (the #1 and #3 most heavily trafficked domains on the internet), which are both blocked in China.

The key here (for the purposes of Net Market Share and this article) is to get a representative sample of users, not firehose of data representing traffic. As long as Net Market Share can get an adequate and representative sample from places like China, weighting that sample by population and usage surveys is a perfectly reasonable way to get at the big picture of worldwide browser marketshare.

This is truly stupid. Facebook & YouTube etc have the most visitors (unique and repeat), therefore they are the most representative of users on the internet. It doesn't make sense to normalize away from them for Chinese, Burmese, and Mongolese internet users.

You're conflating traffic share with browser share. Stop doing that, and then you'll understand the point of the article.

I can't see how Akamai can be considered a wider dataset when their data is also predominantly biased towards heavily trafficked Western corporate websites and media providers. For example, Akamai provides services for both Facebook and YouTube (the #1 and #3 most heavily trafficked domains on the internet), which are both blocked in China.

but they have plenty of other customers who are not blocked and they presumably have built out many points of presence in China due to customer demand. The public data at http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/dataviz3.html shows that while North America has the highest traffic, there are comparable volumes from Europe, Asia and South America.

Except East Asia doesn't have a comparable population, it has a population that exceeds North America, Europe, and South America, combined. And unless Akamai is explicitly removing or deweighting Facebook, Google, and Youtube requests from their numbers, those top sites are massively skewing the overall output towards North America and Europe.

You're conflating traffic share with browser share. Stop doing that, and then you'll understand the point of the article.

Don't be condescending it will not work well for you because you are wrong. Normalizing like quoted below is useless for almost all web developers. We are developing for actual audiences that are not residing in China and not visiting the english/european language sites that we are developing and interested in as readers of this site.

From Netmarketshare...

Quote:

The Net Market Share data is weighted by country. We compare our traffic to the CIA Internet Traffic by Country table, and weight our data accordingly. For example, if our global data shows that Brazil represents 2% of our traffic, and the CIA table shows Brazil to represent 4% of global Internet traffic, we will count each unique visitor from Brazil twice. This is done to balance out our global data. All regions have differing markets, and if our traffic were concentrated in one or more regions, our global data would be inappropriately affected by those regions. Country level weighting removes any bias by region.

Don't be condescending it will not work well for you because you are wrong. Normalizing like quoted below is useless for almost all web developers. We are developing for actual audiences that are not residing in China and not visiting the english/european language sites that we are developing and interested in as readers of this site.

Then go visit another site that provides the data you're interested in and bitch in their comments section. This article is explicitly about worldwide browser marketshare, and you don't get that from unfiltered and unweighted data that's biased towards North American websites. Do that and then I won't have to explain these things to you like I would to a small child any more.

People expect these kind of usage stats to be based on traffic because that's the only really meaningful metric for most people, which makes NA data kinda useless. If there were 5 gazillion unique IE users but they only looked a 1 page every 10 years.... well, you get it.....

On the other hand if for every 999 IE users visiting a page once, there is some crazy lynx user reloading the same page a million times, then the IE users are probably more important. Just as, if you're writing a commercial website, it's probably more useful to know what your biggest spending customers use rather than mere traffic alone.

All statistics are worthless unless you view them in a sensible context. And what is most relevant is always highly context dependent.

Getting stroppy because you don't like the results is utterly futile. Why on Earth should it matter to you that much?

It matters a great deal to web developers because the goals of doing cool sites and broadly compatible sites are often at odds. IE 8 and 9 may be gone in the US by the end of the user, and when that happens we'll be able to do some cool stuff.

(I'm assuming that you meant IE 8/9 will be gone by the end of the year.) I don't want to sound snarky, and I don't want to presume to know what cool stuff you want to do—I sincerely, honestly don't—but ...

If it was me, I reckon I'd do cool stuff now and let the Luddites upgrade or switch to something that works. (Or, simply have reduced functionality in older versions with a notice that they're running reduced functionality. Here's a nickel kid. Go buy yourself a real browser.)

On the other hand, I'm not a web developer, and I'm certainly not you. If that doesn't work, then I'm sorry, and I, too, hope that people actually upgrade someday.

Yeah, telling the bottom 20% to get lost is something you can do on a weekend project, but if you work for a corporation, well then no, especially since the CEO probably is in that 20%.

Yes, in practice you can do reduced functionality but that only gets you so far and testing on old browsers becomes a permanent cost. I'm SO glad that I finally retired my IE 6 and IE 7 vmware instances...

When we get everyone up to a minimum of IE 10 there will be a whole host of html5 and css3 features we'll be able to use. End of year maybe? That might be optimistic but that IE 9 line is falling fast:

It matters a great deal to web developers because the goals of doing cool sites and broadly compatible sites are often at odds. IE 8 and 9 may be gone in the US by the end of the user, and when that happens we'll be able to do some cool stuff.

But then it probably doesn't really matter in general still, it matters what visitors to *your* site are using. Chrome or IE could be the most popular web browser in the world but if everyone visiting your site is doing so in Safari, then that's what should count to you. Obviously if you're starting something completely new then it's trickier and you probably then need *both* sets of figures to get a good grasp of what might be important in general, since you can't possibly know what kind of demographic you're going to get in that case.

Meh. I wouldn't want to code in a way that was specific to one set of users. Developers code many different sites across their careers and coding to chrome only just because you work on "chrome-central.com" would just be a bad habbit. Much better to be in the habit of coding to "your next job".

I have seen comments that indicate many still use IE6 in particular because of incompatible internal company webpages. That indicates the problem is with the companies internal design group not following the standards and using IE6 only features. Designing around one browser and not the standards is not good practice. Browser features change but the accepted standards do not. One of my peeves is people who do not standard compliant web pages.

Also, I believe IE6 is no longer supported by MS so continued use of it is a serious security risk. Hopefully upgrading from WinXP will force companies to rewrite their internal pages and make them standards compliant.

Problem is deeper and more complicated than you think. Most businesses relies on age-old ActiveX control only compatible with IE6. To remedy this first the company has to spend money to update the code, chances are the code was written by companies long since gone with no source code available, so a lot of money is needed to re-develop it. Secondly, even if you have a new state-of-the-art codebase or application, the old ActiveX platform is business critical, meaning you have to shut down the operation of your company, even 1 day that is a lot of money. If there are imcompatible components, e.g. database, it can take longer than one day to port all the data. Third, you have to re-train all your staff, and productivity initially will drop, again costing money. Fourth, to ensure transistion go smoothly one may have to introduce the new system in parrallel, ensuring there is the old system to fall back to. This adds complexity to the transistion and takes months of planning.

You're conflating traffic share with browser share. Stop doing that, and then you'll understand the point of the article.

Don't be condescending it will not work well for you because you are wrong. Normalizing like quoted below is useless for almost all web developers. We are developing for actual audiences that are not residing in China and not visiting the english/european language sites that we are developing and interested in as readers of this site.

From Netmarketshare...

Quote:

The Net Market Share data is weighted by country. We compare our traffic to the CIA Internet Traffic by Country table, and weight our data accordingly. For example, if our global data shows that Brazil represents 2% of our traffic, and the CIA table shows Brazil to represent 4% of global Internet traffic, we will count each unique visitor from Brazil twice. This is done to balance out our global data. All regions have differing markets, and if our traffic were concentrated in one or more regions, our global data would be inappropriately affected by those regions. Country level weighting removes any bias by region.

Yes, if you code your website you should take into account people who actually visit your site, but this is not the point of this article. This article tries to show global browser marker share.

The interesting thing for me on those charts is the slow but steady decline happening with Chrome. I wonder what that is about?

Pure speculation:

Memory use is one.

Not having a menu bar (mostly because that means no alt+commands) has recently become more grating on me.

Firefox has been catching up in some features (e.g. the pdf viewer so you don't have to have one installed).

Increasing squirliness about Google's view into your life.

I don't know if any of these by themselves are big deals on their own, but maybe together they're starting to have some weight.

I use Chrome for general surfing because of its security. There have always been things that I don't like about it but was willing to tolerate for the security.

My general purpose machine is an ancient laptop with memory maxed out at only 1 GB and Chrome will cripple it if I have 10 or more tabs open. I have also been experiencing BSoD crashes of late that I'm pretty sure are Chrome related. I switched from Firefox because so many features were broken by their rapid release cycle, but it seems to be more stable of late so it may be time to switch back.

I have seen comments that indicate many still use IE6 in particular because of incompatible internal company webpages. That indicates the problem is with the companies internal design group not following the standards and using IE6 only features. Designing around one browser and not the standards is not good practice. Browser features change but the accepted standards do not. One of my peeves is people who do not standard compliant web pages.

Also, I believe IE6 is no longer supported by MS so continued use of it is a serious security risk. Hopefully upgrading from WinXP will force companies to rewrite their internal pages and make them standards compliant.

Internal developers within enterprise companies, using Sharepoint technologies or other .NET tools, would have developed to what MS allowed for and IE could support at the time. Given IE 6 and below didn't support 'standards' very well at the time, coding to them would have been a questionable strategy. When you have tens of thousands of users in an enterprise setting, you're not assuming they're all going to be using different browsers and settings; you're assuming they'll all be using one: IE.

I keep hoping that one day, one of these articles will be posted that won't have the instant "well I don't like these numbers because Statcounter is better" comments.

You use different tools to measure different things. If you're a web developer targeting the west, Statcounter's numbers are probably very useful to you in determining version support. If you actually want a global browser share in terms of the percent of people who use it on a day-to-day basis, NetStat's numbers are the the ones more likely to be accurate. They count unique users, not traffic, and they weight in terms of the number of internet-using citizens, for whom the people who ARE tracked are considered a representative sample.

I wonder what is driving chromes drop in marketshare. i certainly dont find anything compelling in firefox to switch back.

Indeed. I dumped Firefox after enduring months of rushed updates that made the software more and more leaky and unstable. I hated losing all my plugins by going to Chrome, but at least I can browse the web.

As a web developer trying to stay on top of what browsers people are actually using out there...

As a web developer surely the most important statistics are for the website you're developing for?

Can i borrow your time machine?

It'll cost you...

Seriosuly though, if you are updating a website or you or your company have any experience of working in the market you're designing for then you should have better statistics for your use then any of the browser market share companies could possibly have.

If you're entering a market you have no experience with and are unable to get statistics from any other sources then you might have to be guided by general browser usage. But global statistics are really a poor guide unless you expect your users to be a representative sample of the global population.

Also I've worked on websites where a significant number of users are stuck on IE 6. If I had just looked at even the country statistics I wouldn't have known this.

NetApplications isn't counting HITS. It's counting USERS. If you think the two are the same thing, there's a serious problem with your understanding. StatCounter and wikimedia count something entirely different than NetApplication does. It's like comparing apples and the number of people who eat apples.

In spite of Google's activation numbers which claim that every person on the planet owns what, 3?, 4? Android phones by now...In spite of many proclamations in these threads for more than a year that Safari market share is just about to tank...

Android phones cover the whole spectrum of phone users, while iOS is still high end only. I imagine quite a few Android users never open the browser.

Quote:

Don't be condescending it will not work well for you because you are wrong. Normalizing like quoted below is useless for almost all web developers. We are developing for actual audiences that are not residing in China and not visiting the english/european language sites that we are developing and interested in as readers of this site.

As I said before, in 2013 browser marketshare is academic for web developers, code to the spec. If you do anything else and targeting the public, you are doing it wrong. Many popular sites already refuse to support the old IEs, so ignoring them will not affect your traffic in a significant way.

Quote:

Internal developers within enterprise companies, using Sharepoint technologies or other .NET tools, would have developed to what MS allowed for and IE could support at the time. Given IE 6 and below didn't support 'standards' very well at the time, coding to them would have been a questionable strategy.

.Net actually never favored IE specific features. While the first few versions weren't exactly standards compliant, they were close enough that they worked in alternate browsers anyway.

Quote:

I dumped Firefox after enduring months of rushed updates that made the software more and more leaky and unstable.

NetApplications isn't counting HITS. It's counting USERS. If you think the two are the same thing, there's a serious problem with your understanding. StatCounter and wikimedia count something entirely different than NetApplication does. It's like comparing apples and the number of people who eat apples.

Yep, understood. They're different. Further to what you say, NetApplication applies a methodology and the others just blindly count. But they both aim to convey a browser market share. This intention is the apples.

As a web developer trying to stay on top of what browsers people are actually using out there...

As a web developer surely the most important statistics are for the website you're developing for?

Can i borrow your time machine?

It'll cost you...

Seriosuly though, if you are updating a website or you or your company have any experience of working in the market you're designing for then you should have better statistics for your use then any of the browser market share companies could possibly have.

If you're entering a market you have no experience with and are unable to get statistics from any other sources then you might have to be guided by general browser usage. But global statistics are really a poor guide unless you expect your users to be a representative sample of the global population.

Also I've worked on websites where a significant number of users are stuck on IE 6. If I had just looked at even the country statistics I wouldn't have known this.

Chris, you must agree that as a developer (developing a new site) you have to work out how much of your time you will spend on cross-browser compatibility. Fully supporting IE6 (functionality, graphics, the works) can add time and cost to a project. Supporting IE8 and up is much faster. But you don't want to alienate customers, so there's a balance in there somewhere in there. If I know that IE6+7 market share is down below, say, 0.5%, then I might target IE8+ and forget about them. Then monitor my site stats and see if I'm driving away a significant amount of IE6+7 traffic. That's all I'm saying.

Chris, you must agree that as a developer (developing a new site) you have to work out how much of your time you will spend on cross-browser compatibility. Fully supporting IE6 (functionality, graphics, the works) can add time and cost to a project. Supporting IE8 and up is much faster. But you don't want to alienate customers, so there's a balance in there somewhere in there. If I know that IE6+7 market share is down below, say, 0.5%, then I might target IE8+ and forget about them. Then monitor my site stats and see if I'm driving away a significant amount of IE6+7 traffic. That's all I'm saying.

Ok that's fair enough. All I was trying to point out is that general statistics can be very misleading for any individual web site. I consider them a last resort for when you can't get more focused stats.

NetApplications isn't counting HITS. It's counting USERS. If you think the two are the same thing, there's a serious problem with your understanding. StatCounter and wikimedia count something entirely different than NetApplication does. It's like comparing apples and the number of people who eat apples.

Yep, understood. They're different. Further to what you say, NetApplication applies a methodology and the others just blindly count. But they both aim to convey a browser market share. This intention is the apples.

Gotcha. I took the focus on the numbers (highlighting that NetApplications is millions vs billions) as an implied indication that you were comparing them 1:1 or considered their data less valuable because of the orders of magnitude difference in raw numbers. If that was not your intention, then I mistook what you were saying. Many people in this thread have made such an assertion without understanding the metric difference or the fact that NetApplications weights their numbers to account for having lower hit counts in countries like China.

I find that while they attempt to measure the same thing, tools like Statcounter aren't a very good tool for actual global reach, because of their non-weighting. As a pure "what browsers should I target" metric for developers, it's very useful because pure hit counts are a great way to see what users in your area are more likely to use, and thus need to be targeted. For global browser share, I think percentage of users is a better metric than number of hits.